Be prepared to pay for nothing Requested a translation from Gengo for which I had to pay in advance. Then told there was no translator willing/able to take it on because it was too difficult but they were going to keep the money anyway as a "credit" in my account! Alternatively I could pay more for their premium service. Not on your nelly. Will stick to reputable/serious translation agencies in the future or Google Translate rather than throw my money out of the window.

Paying for google translate... We are an online furniture retailer and have spent over $10k on translations for our European expansion to find out upon going live that almost all of the translations done are just copy and pasted from google translate. It’s an absolute disgrace and utterly fraudulent as a service. We are now in the process of escalating this issue now that we have found out about it. In the event we get resolution I shall come back and edit this review.

This is what you need to do to get a high quality translation I have been translating for Gengo for a couple of months now and have had a read through the reviews with many clients complaining about issues with their translation. I basically only ever work on jobs at the Pro level rate of $0.09 because only this rate allows for enough time to produce a quality translation. In regards to the bad reviews: I believe this is a matter of you get what you paid for. If you submit your translation as a standard translation the translator gets paid a measly $0.03 to $0.035 per word which is way below industry standards (at least a third lower than what a professional translator usually charges). Generally speaking, a translator translates around 300 words per hour. This means a translator makes around $9.00 per hour at these rates. In most countries this would be below minimum wage and without any of the perks that come with being employed (annual leave, sick leave, paid public holidays. So, in order to make some money a translator will need to churn out at least 600 words per hour if not more. Hence, the quality of this translation will never be as good as a translation done for the Pro rate of $0.09. Put simply if you want a high quality translation please submit your job as a Pro job and a professional translator will work on your translation. You simply cannot expect a high quality translation at the standard rate. For even higher quality translations, provide as much context as possible and a glossary if needed. Also, if you submit your translation through their system it gets split across different translators. This means that your final translation will be inconsistent in style and terminology. In order to avoid this simply submit your translation in a word document or excel spreadsheet. A professional translator will then ensure style and terminology are consistent across your whole document. I hope this is helpful. Thanks, Your Master educated Professional Gengo Translator

Don't trust them! I had a critical document that had one paragraph needing translation to Chinese. They said it would take between 2 - 5 hours, which was fine. At 4 hours I sent in a request to find the status and they told me that "hadn't found a translator yet." Are you kidding me?!!! Needless to say, I would not recommend this company to anyone.

Bad for everyone Imagine that you're translating subtitles to a video, and the person speaking is stuttering, starting and ending a sentence, changing tense, etc. You translate it in line with the tone of the original translation, as well you should. Then the Gengo review comes in and marks your translation as "awkward". "Well, of course, it's awkward, because the original is awkward," you say. The Gengo support team dismisses you with a repetitive statement of, "As a translator, it's your job to make it not awkward." So, when the original is, "I...I mean...I don't know, I wasn't...I couldn't have...I'm not sure I..." according to Gengo, your translation should be: "I don't know." Anything else will be marked as "awkward". This is a terrible experience for a translator AND a bad result for the customer.